Back Issues: Dame Agatha

In her Critic at Large about Agatha Christie this week, Joan Acocella mentions Edmund Wilson’s critique of the detective-fiction genre. In “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?,” which was published in the issue of October 14, 1944, Wilson turned a sanguine eye on the work of Christie, Rex Stout, and Dashiell Hammett. Wilson found none of them to his liking, and was particularly harsh on Christie’s puzzle mysteries:

Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality which seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out…. It is all like a sleight-of-hand trick, in which the magician diverts your attention from the awkward or irrelevant movements that conceal the manipulation of the cards.

Christie was treated more affectionately by John Updike, in 1960, when he composed an ode to her and Beatrix Potter, the “many-volumed authoresses”:

You know the hedgerow, stile, and barrow, Have sniffed the cabbage, leek, and marrow, Have heard the prim postmistress snicker, And spied out murder in the vicar.

Six years later, Christie and her second husband, the archeologist Max Mallowman, were the subjects of a Talk story by Geoffrey T. Hellman. The piece focussed more on Christie’s role as an assistant to her husband during his dig at the Assyrian city of Nimrud, in present-day Iraq, than it did on her fame as a novelist. Herbert Warren Wind’s obituary for Christie, published in the issue of January 26, 1976, suggested that she was happy not to be the center of attention. Wind concluded his tribute by quoting a letter Christie sent to a journalist who had hoped to interview her:

I am now 81 years of age, and I feel having just published my 81st book that I am entitled to enjoy the happiness of a quiet life, though still continuing, I hope, to write books. I am sure you will understand my feelings and my point of view. I write books which are meant to entertain people, and to sell for that reason. I have never seen any point in informal studies of an author’s work.

Sorry if I am disobliging, but at 81 one does know one’s mind and avoids what one does not like.